How I keep my blog and IG photos light, bright and airy + a super affordable lighting kit review video

Hey there, happy Monday friends! Today I wanted to share a little on the simple and easy edits I make on how I take bright and airy photos here at the Almafied blog and on Instagram. Note: I am no expert at photo taking or lighting but because I always get a lot of questions on how I get my photos to be so bright and airy on Instagram, I thought I’d share the simple ways I personally get my photos to look decent from a non professional to another;) And seriously if I can do it, anyone can! I also made a video on my new YouTube channel where I will pretty much share purchases that my friends might also benefit from, reviews, and anything I enjoy that might be helpful to share with y’all! This first video is an extra step in hopefully getting my photos to still look great during the sad and gloomy days! Here’s the video if you wanna check it out now:

If you ever scrolled down my IG feed, I’m pretty sure the lighting was not so great just a short year ago. I probably didn’t pay much attention to photo lighting until I started this blog to be quite honest. And for me, a bright home makes me happy and so I want that to be translated in my photos and hopefully it can give off a happy feeling to anyone who stumbles upon one of my home photos.

My first choice to get a nice and bright photo is of course natural lighting! I almost never have any house lights or lamps on in my photos. So just open up those window coverings and pay attention what time of day the light floods the space the best. You’ll find you’ll have the best photo ops at this time whether you’re using your dslr camera or your camera phone. When posting an IG photo, I generally do 2 things: up my brightness a tad using the “brightening” editing tool and then finish it off by using the sharpening tool to sharpen the photo a bit. For my blog, I up the brightness a bit if necessary on Photoshop.

Now, when I wanna take a picture in a space that doesn’t have good lighting, say an area with no windows nearby or the sun is already going down, I stick with just using a dslr camera, upping the exposure compensation and placing it on a tripod so the picture will come out clear and still not turning any lights in the house on or even using the camera flash. Then, like I said, I use Photoshop to brighten the photos up a bit for blog photos. Below is an example when I accidentally had a kitchen ceiling light on. The original photo has a warm tone to it. On the edited version, I tried to cut the warmth and it’s probably not the worst, but you can tell it just doesn’t look very natural.

For night-time photos, I don’t ever like to conceal that it’s night but you won’t see very many night photos here on the blog but occasionally I do have some on my IG page. So of course there will be some type of lights on in the pic, but the main thing I do is cut the warm tones a little in my photo by using the instagram editing tool called “warmth” and lower the warmth just to cut the yellow or orange tones in the photo a bit. If I do decide to brighten it a tad, I always make sure not to do too much to where it looks unnatural.

I hope this simple way of editing can help some of you who are interested in easily wanting to make your pics a little brighter and airy looking! One thing I noticed I wrote A LOT on this post is the phrase “a tad/ a bit” and really it’s because I gotta be careful when using that tool not to over do it to where every thing looks so over exposed or unnatural. Subtle changes is the trick and really help a picture look so much better! If you are interested in a lighting kit that might help your photos look even better, especially on those gloomy days, I did purchase an inexpensive one myself which is what that youtube video is all about. I would recommend it to first time users, beginners, bloggers, small online vendors, etc. If you want to see the actual difference it made, check that video at the top out. Thanks so much for stopping by!